This film, now the second reboot of a series that has seven previous installments, isn’t terribly interested in pity, conscience, or redemption. In fact, despite the trappings of a more conventional horror caper  — including a protagonist who has just learned he’s going to be a father  — Cregger’s creation has no intention of going soft on us, all the way through the pitiless ending.

The best use of cherubs since Botticelli. Adam Scott plays Ohm Bauman, a cynical, embittered author penning the end of his very popular “Conquistador” trilogy of books. On a whim, he leaves his palatial modern manse in Washington state and heads out to Ireland, to the very hotel his late parents enjoyed their honeymoon. As Damian McCarthy‘s film is a proper Irish horror story, there’s a witch, a cynic and a drunk involved.

If the beauty of the classic Western at least partially lies in its dependably simplistic morality  —  a villain doing wrong; and a hero stopping them cold  — the modern “neo-western” as Ari Aster’s satirically topical film has often been classified, becomes almost the literal opposite: A film where morality shifts and scuttles about, before getting bludgeoned, shot, blown up, and, eventually paved over and turned into a high-tech office building. 

We get a film that feels more like Herzog just killing time before he gets a better idea.